John M. Carroll

Who is John M. Carroll?

John M. "Jack" Carroll is a distinguished professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State where he previously served as the Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology. Carroll is perhaps best known for his theory of Minimalism in computer instruction, training, and technical communication. Carroll received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 for his contribution to the field of human-computer interaction.

Carroll was a founder of the study of human-computer interaction, one of the nine core areas of Computer Science identified by the Association for Computing Machinery. He served on the program committee of the 1982 Bureau of Standards Conference on the Human Factors of Computing Systems that in effect inaugurated the field, and was the direct predecessor of the field's flagship conference series, the ACM CHI Conferences.

Through the past two decades, Carroll has been involved in the development of the field of Human-Computer Interaction. In 1984 he founded the User Interface Institute at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.